UKPOL.CO.UK

Tag: Imran Hussain

  • Imran Hussain – 2022 Speech on the HM Passport Office Backlog

    Imran Hussain – 2022 Speech on the HM Passport Office Backlog

    The speech made by Imran Hussain, the Labour MP for Bradford East, in the House of Commons on 14 June 2022.

    I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) on securing such an important debate and making such an excellent contribution. I join him and my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy), who sees this from a constituency angle, in paying tribute to the hard-working staff at our passport offices. None of the contributions from Opposition Members is designed in any way to attack the work of hard-working staff. This is about the direction of political leadership.

    Like many Opposition Members, I am inundated with cases of constituents who have waited weeks and months for their passport and now face missing holidays, funerals and weddings as a result of the Government’s failings. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been lost because of the Government’s mistakes, and the human cost cannot be quantified in numbers.

    As has rightly been said time and again, and like many of the crises on this Government’s watch, the passport crisis was entirely foreseeable. I have heard Conservative Members make the case today that somehow, because of the covid pandemic, the crisis was not foreseeable. Anyone could have predicted that, following two years of lockdown in which foreign holidays were ill-advised if not banned outright, there would be a surge in passport applications. It was inevitable and clear for everyone to see, except for Ministers huddled around the Cabinet table who failed to prepare, to anticipate rising demand or to ensure sufficient staffing levels.

    Once more, it is not this Government but ordinary people up and down the country who are going to suffer. The Government have not learned lessons and have not realised that moving nearly all their staff from one crisis to the next—the Afghan refugee crisis, the Ukrainian refugee crisis and, now, the Passport Office crisis—is simply not sustainable.

    The Government are now pressing ahead with more staff cuts that will see 20% to 40% of Home Office staff cut by 2025. Those are not my figures—my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon quoted them earlier, and Conservative Members disputed them—they are from the Government’s own documents. The Minister says the Government do not intend to make those cuts in the Passport Office. Where is the guarantee? Frankly, this Government say one thing one day and change their mind a week later. How can we trust a word that is spoken here unless it is written on paper? At the moment, all that document says is that there will be cuts of between 20% and 40% in the Home Office.

    Given what has happened in the Home Office over the last year alone, making cuts is absolutely mind-boggling. It seems that, after every crisis, Home Office Ministers suffer sudden collective amnesia: they are unable to remember what went wrong and incapable of putting it right as a result.

    This point has perhaps not been made as much here today, but we must not kid ourselves that this is the only crisis the Home Office has overseen, because backlogs, delays and excuses are nothing new in the Home Office. We all know this as constituency MPs. This debate weaves together many of the backlogs right across the Home Office. As I said, the performance of political leadership lacks compassion, humanity and decency.

    When I look at my constituency casework with regards to the Home Office, people are waiting not weeks or months, but years for a decision on their case as Home Office officials drag their feet, leaving my constituents in a state of uncertainty and near permanent limbo. How any Home Office Minister or official can justify or allow this near torturous experience is simply beyond me, yet it still continues.

    I could outline case after case but, time not permitting, I will highlight just two or three. A constituent of mine has been waiting more than a decade for a decision. For the last year, he and I have been making requests so he can see his elderly mother, who is in the last stages of her life, yet he is unable to do so. I have a case where the father is here with his disabled children and the mother has been separated from the children while she waits for her passport. The father has been left alone here looking after their disabled children. I have had cases where there have been refusals because of a 1p discrepancy between the wage slip and the actual salary paid. Again, the reality is that that points towards a lack of compassion, decency and humanity from the Home Office.

    Then there are the extortionate fees that people are made to pay. At a time when working families are struggling to put bread and butter on their table during a cost of living crisis that is a direct result of this Government’s incompetence, ideological austerity cuts over the last decade and mishandling, the Government want to charge working families tens of thousands of pounds for a simple application. That is the reality of where we are.

    It could not be clearer that, under this Tory Government, the Home Office is lurching from crisis to crisis and leaving nothing but carnage for ordinary people in its wake. This is a Home Office that cannot get through a week without another scandal, another failing and another human rights disaster. Frankly, this Home Office is simply not fit for purpose.

  • Imran Hussain – 2019 Speech on the Withdrawal Agreement

    Below is the text of the speech made by Imran Hussain, the Labour MP for Bradford East, in the House of Commons on 12 March 2019.

    I declare straight away that I have never climbed mountains—there is time for me yet to get into it—but it is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb). Time is short, so I will try to be brief and will not take any interventions, because many hon. Members are yet to speak and it would be unfair, in such an important debate, for Members to be reduced to a time limit of two to three minutes—so, my apologies.

    I echo many of the serious concerns that Opposition Members have raised about the Prime Minister’s deal or no deal, and the hugely negative impact that those scenarios will have on our communities, where a Tory Brexit will be devastating. The Prime Minister’s legal guarantee changes nothing. While we have heard lots of debate and emphasis on that today, quite rightly, I wish to concentrate my contribution on the human impact that is at play.

    I will start by looking at my home town and constituency of Bradford, and the destruction that ideological Tory policies and the Government’s austerity cuts have brought upon our communities in Bradford in the last decade. We see rampant poverty gripping the city, with more than half the children living in my constituency in poverty according to the End Child Poverty campaign, ​and with not a week going by that I do not have a worried parent in my constituency advice surgery telling me how they are struggling even to clothe or feed their children because of the desperate poverty that they live in. We see poor educational attainment, with far too many children leaving school without enough GCSEs and far too many unable to go university. We see abysmally low wages, with people in Bradford paid less than the national average, or even the regional average.

    We see insecure jobs and more and more people forced to take on zero-hours contract roles that do not pay the bills and do not offer the protection that they need. We see cuts to local government funding that have crushed advice centres, libraries, community halls and other services that people rely on and that are vital to the fabric of community life. We see an underfunded NHS, with our hospitals creaking as they are forced to do more with less, and staff underappreciated and underpaid. We see uncertain futures, with no hope of tomorrow being better than today and no bright future for our children.

    Do I think that the Prime Minister’s deal or no deal is the right choice and that it will offer people in Bradford a better future? Not at all, because let me be clear: it is the Prime Minister and this Tory Government who have left us in such a state, because it is their austerity that is driving Bradford into the ground, not the EU. We were promised by the leave campaign that everything would be fantastic—that there would be millions more for the NHS, that the economy would be fine and that wages would be higher—but the stark reality is that those promises have failed to materialise and that a Tory Brexit will only devastate our communities further.

    A Tory Brexit will help the Government to strip away workers’ rights—rights we have fought hard for and depend upon—and allow them to continue their relentless pursuit of deregulation to make it easier for people to lose their jobs, their holidays and their representation. It will grind down our economy in Bradford and Yorkshire, which exported £9.7 billion of goods—goods that create thousands of jobs but depend on free and unhindered access to the continent—to the EU in 2017. It will hit wages and the pockets of working people as the economy shrinks, jobs are lost and even food prices rise. It will allow the Government to continue their ideological austerity drive, with money set aside for the regions by the EU not coming back to the north but being spent in the south and the Tory shires. Ultimately, it will worsen poverty, as rights are watered down, jobs are lost, wages shrink and austerity continues.

    People in Bradford have suffered for years under this Tory Government, who have enacted ideologically driven policies and forced poverty on our communities, so why should they trust a Tory Brexit? A Tory Brexit is not the answer for people in Bradford, and nor is a Tory Government, full stop. I cannot support an outcome that would leave people in Bradford worse off. I cannot allow our communities to be dragged further into the spiral of deprivation, social injustice and poverty.